This shouldn't have been removed in the first place. There's literally no net gain to the playerbase from it happening.
Just to go over how dumb of a decision that was, and how it made the game a bit worse by its removal; here's a few things that have become evident since the last patch removed emergencies being active in arkfall circles:
A lack of dynamic/emergent gameplay - Emergencies showing up at an arkfall site added a fun level of chaotic emergent gameplay to the game. That's missing now, unless you get the one or two sites that exist with hardcoded spawns over top of them in-game.
Seeing the Wandering Hulker event hit a hellbug arkfall and start squishing things as it rampaged around was genuinely entertaining. And having two helicopters of mutants drop in on top of an arkfall actually counter-balanced the ridiculous zerging that occurs any time one shows up. It also makes for an entertaining three way melee.
These sort of events were rare, but at least you could say that maybe while you were doing your umpteenth Arkfall they might happen. Now it's literally an impossibility, and there's no room for deviation from the content of the arkfalls themselves.
Slower Progression - As of this patch, any time a major arkfall appears emergencies stop spawning in the red circle that appears on the map. What's worse, any existing emergencies will immediately despawn, giving players no credit for completing or doing them if they were in progress.
This serves to slow down progression, as areas of the gameworld become devoid of any real NPC life outside of the landmarks until the arkfall is completed or runs out. Which serves to decrease the rewards a player gets over time. Which moves the game ever so slightly away from being about enjoying the game itself, and towards the direction of being yet another obnoxious grindathon MMO.
Oh, and if you were wondering, yes, the rare episodic events (IE: Armistice Celebration in Madera, Uninvited Guests in San Francisco, etc, etc.) like the Pilgrim content will despawn if an arkfall decides to overlay the area they take place in. And you won't get credit for doing them.
Which means you first have to clear the arkfall, then drive around until you find another instance of it. A process that can take at least an hour, if not more if you're unlucky.
It makes arkfalls even more obnoxious - By removing any rewards or incentives to doing PVE gameplay while an arkfall is active in an area, you give incentives for people to cluster up together to do the arkfall.
This increases the scaling of mobs, which in turn turns many of the mobs in these events into obnoxiously boring bullet sponges. This in turn increases the time it takes to do the arkfall, and generally just screws everyone over to one degree or another.
Now, this is a debatable point, but I don't find the arkfalls very fun. Having gotten to San Fran and completed the current storyline i've done dozens upon dozens of them by now. They're formulaic, extremely linear, and there's really nothing unique or world changing about them.
They're basically a poor man's version of rifts from Rift, the other game Trion produced. They don't do anything to the game world like rifts do in Rift. They just kind of hover on the map until the timer runs out or a horde of players completes it.
Heck, you can't even say failure to do them leaves any effects, since when they're completed or the timer runs out all the mobs in the arkfall area immediately despawn like they never existed.
In fact, they're basically just low grade, somewhat boring loot pinatas for people who want the pursuits related to them. Or for people who don't realize that the time it takes to do an instance gives vastly improved rewards while offering a wider range of content.
Making them seem worse is probably the last thing you want to do right now. And removing content (and worse, content that people might be in the middle of doing and is time limited before its removal) in favor of that is definitely one way to do that.
And regardless of all of that or your opinions on it, removing content is never a good thing in that sort of situation. Emergencies didn't and still don't infringe on the do-ability of arkfalls. However, as things currently are, arkfalls do infringe on the do-ability of emergencies. And in a completely obtuse, unpredictable, and unavoidable way that is very player unfriendly to boot.
Like I said at the start of the post, I can't even see why this was done in the first place.
It didn't actually do anything helpful, and just served to make the game a bit more formulaic and like its competitors. Can we please get emergencies back to how they were?
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Originally Posted by Lorres
